A Book In You

Two years from now—give or take—Elizabeth Spiers, the founding editor of the gossip Web sites Gawker and The Kicker, will publish her first novel. Around the same time, Glenn Reynolds, who writes the political Web log Instapundit, will also have a book in stores. So, too, may writers from the blogs Hit & Run, The Black Table, Dong Resin, Zulkey, Low Culture, Lindsayism, Megnut, Maud Newton, MemeFirst, Old Hag, PressThink, I Keep a Diary, Buzz Machine, Engadget, and Eurotrash. Suddenly, books by bloggers will be a trend, a cultural phenomenon. You will probably read about it in the Sunday Times. And when that happens the person to thank—or blame—will be Kate Lee, who is currently a twenty-seven-year-old assistant at International Creative Management.

Lee spends the majority of her workday in the manner of any agent-to-be: reading manuscripts from the slush pile, vetting contracts, negotiating rights, checking her boss’s voice mail. But she spends approximately an hour each day reading blogs. She scans a dozen first thing in the morning and keeps tabs on another twenty-seven throughout the day, though any of these may lead her to countless others. Reading blogs on company time is hardly unheard of, but Lee does not so much read as prospect, sifting through sloppy thinking, bad grammar, and blind self-indulgence for moments of actual good writing. It’s too soon to say how this will pay off, but she represents writers from the first six blogs listed above and is in talks with writers from the rest.

“Most writers are not getting published in magazines or literary journals,” Lee said the other day, clicking through her Internet Explorer favorites in her cluttered cubicle at the I.C.M. office on West Fifty-seventh Street. “For some more unconventional voices, for people that don’t have connections, blogs can be an entryway into the game.” Lee’s first e-mail query to Spiers, in March of 2003, was the easiest one to send. Gawker had already received the kind of publicity that can propel a book to the best-seller list. But turning bloggers into authors, Lee knew, required more than just printing out a year’s worth of posts and slapping a cover on them. “Look, I think everyone would love to do a Gawker book,” she said. “It’s a recognizable brand. The question is how do you do the book right?” When Spiers confessed that she’d been working on a novel unconnected to her Web site, Lee realized that it was the writer, not the blog, that she really wanted to represent. (Last September, Spiers left Gawker to start The Kicker.)

There are more than a million blogs, and very few of them will ever get the attention of Kate Lee—or of anyone outside each blogger’s circle of family and friends. “There are people who use their blogs to write, like, ‘Today I went to the cleaners,’ ” Lee said. Sometimes she writes to a blogger only to get the e-mail equivalent of a blank stare. The pseudonymous author of The Minor Fall, The Major Lift was particularly unreceptive. “What am I going to write a book about?” he replied.

Even if positioning herself as agent to the blogosphere ultimately does little for Lee’s career, she’ll have no regrets. “I’m now friends with these people,” she said. TMFTML, in particular, often invites her along when the New York blogging clique meets up for drinks or karaoke. Still, she remains something of a curiosity in this scene. “People tell me all the time, ‘You should blog.’ But I don’t have that need to share everything I’m thinking.”

A few evenings later, Lee called from her cell phone while hailing a taxi. After directing the driver to East Seventy-second Street, she said she wanted to make it clear that, while she loves her bloggers, and has faith in them, it can be difficult to get them to be productive. “They all have day jobs,” she pointed out. Writing anything longer than a blog post is a commitment they don’t always seem up for. “Anyway, I’ve started working with a couple of graduates of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. It’s very exciting. They’re interesting writers—with training, and degrees to show for it.”

Sign up for the daily newsletter.Sign up for the daily newsletter: the best of The New Yorker every day.